The Assyrian Siege of Lachish

TODD BOLEN/BIBLEPLACES.COM

The Assyrian destruction of the Judahite city of Lachish in 701 BCE—just 30 years later than that of Gezer—is one of the best-illustrated sieges of antiquity. The devastation is illuminated not only through the discoveries of several long-running excavation projects, but even more vividly through the magnificent stone reliefs found in the palace of the Assyrian King Sennacherib at Nineveh, now in the British Museum. These reliefs are done in such realistic detail that most authorities think they were executed based on sketches made in the field by the king’s “war correspondents.”

The scenes at Lachish depict the walled city, attacked by wheeled battering rams, missiles flying back and forth. The city is shown billowing in flames, the hapless survivors fleeing the gate with their knapsacks, headed for exile in far-away Assyria. Elsewhere, prisoners are shown beheaded, their heads stacked like watermelons in the market. Others are impaled on long pikes, their bodies paraded around the city walls. Others are staked out on the ground, being flayed alive. In one scene, a woman is hauled before the seated King Sennacherib, held by the hair and threatened with being beheaded.

The British excavations of Lachish in the 1930s recovered the remains of some 1,500 individuals, probably the entire population who were slaughtered except for those few who were taken captive and sent into exile. All this was standard Assyrian military policy, based on utter destruction of the enemy, and the terrorization of the few who were spared.